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No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader

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Mark Hodkinson grew up among dark satanic mills in a house with just one book: Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. Simon Armitage, doing star jumps with his wife on their daughter’s trampoline when he was made poet laureate. I work in a library and we are fighting to stay open with a diminishing readership as Kindles and e readers take over, and ‘real’ books fall by the wayside. From an early age he loved to read, which was viewed with great suspicion by most of his family and friends.

Hodkinson's imagery and sparks of comedy make it an enjoyable read, and his Northern, gravelly narration adds to its realism. The police brought her back to my bewildered granddad on many occasion, before she had to go into a nursing home. A book left in a room, ready to be picked up or among others in a bookcase, is a symbol of downtime to come, a respite. Even if you recognise you probably won’t have time to read them all, you are already forming a relationship with mortality which we all must do at some point in our lives. e liked the same music as they did, but there was something about the magic of the worlds contained in a book that he fell for completely.It's about schools (bad), music (good) and the people (some mad, a few sane), and pre-eminently and profoundly the books and authors (some bad, mostly good) that led the way, shaped a life.

This is a tale of the books that shaped the author's teens and twenties interwoven with an elegy to his grandfather who sustained a head-injury in a railway accident and suffered from mental health issues as a result. At that point, the books shifts into a slightly different perspective, more about Mark's career and how it intertwines his reading, and his reading drives his career.I reserved his book for 75p in hardback not long after it came out, had to wait for a couple of people, then it was mine! The young Hodkinson read those books but found the protagonists too earthbound, too fixed in their northern locales. I can’t be bothered giving much more time to this self-centred monologue, so I’ll just say that that “awful school” inspired me - three post-graduate degrees, a life of working with disadvantaged communities, shelves (and a Kindle) full of books (including Tolstoy); and never did it let down either my brother or my sister- or anyone else I knew.

Yes, this is a pretty brutal review, and I only feel comfortable about this because the book has received a lot of favourable press which I feel needs tempering. I feel that this book really ran some parallels with my own upbringing, although there are some years between us.

More than this sense of place, there was a deeper geography at work in the short, sharp sentences and the rhythm of ordinary acts of living expressed until it became hypnotic. There is also anti-intellectualism at work, as if they are afraid of you becoming clever in case you walk away, leave them behind. It’s about the schools, the music, the people – but pre-eminently and profoundly the books and authors that led the way and shaped his life. They were not the inspiration of his writing and reading, nor the reason he has now accumulated 3,500 books. Mark's asides about his granddad really resonate with me, as my nan had Alzheimers during most of my early teens and would often escape from home and be found wandering towards her own childhood home.

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